This special issue of IJMES co-edited by regular IJMES editor Juan R. I. Cole and by Editorial Board member Deniz Kandiyoti, is based on two conferences sponsored by the Social Science Research Council in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (27–29 October 1996) and Berkeley, California (24–25 November 1997). The conferences brought together Central Asian, Middle Eastern, South Asian, European, and U.S. scholars to deliberate on issues in nationalism and the colonial legacy (because of the different connotations of these words in Russian, the Tashkent conference was entitled “Nation-Building After Independence”). The Tashkent meeting was made possible through the financial support of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Program on Peace and International Cooperation of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago. The editors are deeply grateful to the Uzbekistan government and to the University of World Economics and Diplomacy and its staff for their hospitality in Tashkent, and to our Central Asian and other colleagues who presented papers and shared insights. (Thanks also to the skillful simultaneous translators!) Cassandra Cavanaugh was also crucial to the local arrangements. I think all were keenly aware that a new relationship was being built, of which this special issue of IJMES is the first physical manifestation. We are also enormously indebted to Steven Heydemann, Near East program officer at the council, for his truly heroic efforts in finding support, getting permissions, and generally making the conferences we had only imagined actually happen. This issue of IJMES is dedicated to the memory of Anthony Hyman (d. 1999), whose last article is being published here posthumously. We are the poorer for having lost this valued colleague, who was very dedicated to Afghanistan, and it is fitting that his last publication be on that troubled land.

The study of nationalism has been reinvigorated by the debates on the subject carried out in the 1980s and 1990s.1 Most authors on the subject can be divided into two camps; those who look at the material and objective conditions for the rise of nation-states as a social formation, and those who concentrate on how a national consciousness emerges. (In recent years, this division has ranged classical Marxists and modernization theorists on one side against postmodernists and subaltern theorists on the other). In considering this body of work, one can thus make a distinction similar to the one that E. P. Thompson famously elaborated (drawing on Marx) in labor history, differentiating between a class in itself and a class for itself, between a social class such as factory workers constituted by the objective facts of its material existence and a social grouping that is self-conscious about itself as a class so that it launches unions and labor parties. The former does not automatically or always result in the latter. We will discuss these theories in relationship to the Middle East and Central Asia and to the little theoretical work done on Middle Eastern nationalisms. Many authors speak as though “nationalism” is a unitary set of practices and beliefs that has a natural history, being born at a particular time and maturing into a long-term, fairly static phenomenon. Partha Chatterjee has shown, however, that the character of nationalism changes according to whether it is a metropolitan phenomenon or a colonial one. Implicit in his work, further, is that nationalism—or, at least, the making and conceiving of nationalism—continues in the post-colonial period, throwing up new forces and perspectives that challenge previous formulations of it.2 Most writers on the subject worry about how the culture of nationalism tends to create a positive image of the nation as homogeneous while defining itself against a hated and despised Other or set of Others, within and without.3 The debate over the peculiarities of the colonial legacy and its long-term impact on the colonized has constituted the central theme of post-colonial scholarship. Those involved in the two mainly disparate debates—on nationalism and on post-colonialism—need to address each other's concerns. To date, most discussions of the post-colonial condition have centered on South Asia, and it is our aim to open up this debate by considering the very different cases of the Middle East and Central Asia, the one having been subjected to capitalist colonialism, and the latter to czarist domination, followed by the Soviet experiment, with all the ambiguities it introduced in relations between metropole and periphery.

Iraq was formed as a modern state under a British Mandate in 1920. Its constituents were the Ottoman vilayets of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. As such, it was the product of two “colonial” administrations: first of the modernizing Ottoman state of the Tanzimat and the Young Turks' Constitution of 1908, then of the British Mandate.

“Nationalism in the Middle East, as has often been noted, is a gift of the West.”1 While concurring with G. E. Von Grunebaum's 1962 observation, Bernard Lewis added that “[t]he ever-fertile continent of Europe had, however, more than one example to offer to its neophytes and disciples.”2 Distinguishing Western European “patriotism” from German “nationalism,” Lewis observed: “Patriotism, most of us agree, is right and good—the love and loyalty that all of us owe to our country. Nationalism, on the other hand, is something rather alien and therefore rather suspect.”3 He keenly discerned that “the first stirrings of the new loyalty in the Middle East took the form of patriotism, not nationalism.”4 But in its later phases, the “new loyalty” took the shape of a nationalism characterized as “romantic, subjective, often illiberal and chauvinistic, contemptuous of legal loyalties, and neglectful of personal freedom.”5 Although these arguments are heavily rhetorical and ideological, Lewis was correct in identifying two distinct modalities of nationalist imagination. But these modalities had more to do with the tropes of nationalism than with an assumed European pedagogy. 6 An exploration of the competing tropes of national imagination allows for the decoupling of nationalism from a political etiology that constitutes Europe as the original home of modernity.7 While recognizing the mimetic or “modular” types of nationalism, 8 a tropological approach allows for the exploration of the inventive vernacular contents of nationalist imagination. Such an approach, according to Hayden White, “centers attention on the turns in a discourse: turns from one level of generalization to another, from one phase of a sequence to another, from a description to an analysis or the reverse, from a figure to a ground or from an event to its context, from the conventions of one genre to those of another within a single discourse, and so on.”9 In a tropological study of nationalism, the focus of inquiry shifts from a schizochronic historiography attending to the belated delivery of “a gift of the West” to the Rest to a decolonized and post-nationalist historiography that explores the contingent and novel deployments of territory, history, language, ethnicity, religion, and culture in the making of a serially continuous and homogeneous polity endowed with competing identities and characteristics.

The history of Turkistan in the second half of the 19th and the early 20th century has repeatedly attracted the attention of social scientists. It is widely recognized that the tendency of most Soviet authors was to consider this history under the rubric of “the progressive consequences of annexation to Russia,” at a time when the main historiographical trend was to investigate the history of revolutions, movements of the working class and peasants, riots among the people, and national-liberation movements. Under the same rubric, during a rather long period until the end of the 1980s, many problems of local Turkistan society were written about. As a result of this approach, some questions remained unasked—questions that challenged the officially mandated proposition that “despite tsarist colonialism, the annexation of non-Russian peoples to Russia was a progressive reality.” In particular, one of these questions has to do with the history of the state that governed the territory of Turkistan in the colonial and post-colonial periods.

In August 1924, Anabibi Safaeva set off from her home city of Khiva, which was then the capital of the Xorezm People's Republic, to study in Tashkent, which was the administrative center of the Turkistan Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Safaeva traveled with some 160 students in a convoy of three boats down the Amu River toward the Aral Sea. However, misfortune befell Safaeva: her boat was attacked by basmachis, a bandit or rebel gang.1 The basmachis killed all twenty-two of the men in Safaeva's group and carried off the women as captives. By the time that Safaeva was rescued, more than two months later, there was no longer a Xorezm People's Republic or a Turkistan Republic; instead, Safaeva's Khivan home was now in Uzbekistan, and Tashkent, the goal of her academic pilgrimage, had become the capital of Uzbekistan.

The term “post-colonial” is a relative newcomer to the jargon of Western social science. Although discussions about the effects of colonial and imperialist domination are by no means new, the various meanings attached to the prefix “post-” and different understandings of what characterizes the post-colonial continue to make this term a controversial one. Among the criticisms leveled against it, reviewed comprehensively by Hall (1996), are the dangers of careless homogenizing of experiences as disparate as those of white settler colonies, such as Australia and Canada; of the Latin American continent, whose independence battles were fought in the 19th century; and countries such as India, Nigeria, or Algeria that emerged from very different colonial encounters in the post-World War II era. He suggests, nevertheless, that “What the concept may help us to do is to describe or characterise the shift in global relations which marks the (necessarily uneven) transition from the age of Empires to the post-independence and post-decolonisation moment” (Hall 1996, 246). Rattansi (1997) proposes a distinction between “post-coloniality” to designate a set of historical epochs and “post-colonialism” or “post-colonialist studies” to refer to a particular form of intellectual inquiry that has as its central defining theme the mutually constitutive role played by colonizer and colonized in shaping the identities of both the dominant power and those at the receiving end of imperial and colonial projects. Within the field of post-colonial studies itself, Moore-Gilbert (1997) points to the divide between “post-colonial criticism,” which has much earlier antecedents in the writings of those involved in anti-colonial struggles, and “post-colonial theory,” which distinguishes itself from the former by the incoporation of methodological paradigms derived from contemporary European cultural theories into discussions of colonial systems of representation and cultural production. Whatever the various interpretations of the term or the various temporalities associated with it might be, Hall claims that the post-colonial “marks a critical interruption into that grand whole historiographical narrative which, in liberal historiography and Weberian historical sociology, as much as in the dominant traditions of Western Marxism, gave this global dimension a subordinate presence in a story that could essentially be told from its European parameters” (Hall 1996, 250). In what follows, I will attempt a brief discussion of some of the circumstances leading to the emergence of this concept and interrogate the extent to which it lends itself to a meaningful comparison of the modern trajectories of societies in the Middle East and Central Asia.

The theme of “Nationalism after Colonialism” as far as Afghanistan is concerned begs many questions: with the national or patriotic idea so weak and undeveloped, it arguably makes more sense to analyze rival ideas of the nation held by the country's different ethnic groups than some hypothetical all-embracing Afghan nationalism. When did the era of colonialism (neo-colonialism would be more apt) end—or, indeed, begin? Quite as much as foreign colonialism, was not internal colonialism by Pashtun tribal elites the major feature of development of nationalism in modern Afghanistan?

The story of the collapse of the USSR and of the newly independent states that have risen on its ruins is still shrouded in mystery, because the actual cause of the rapid breakdown of the strong power is not quite comprehensible. Statements to the effect that the underlying cause was an inefficient economy do not seem convincing, as even during the so-called stagnation period, the annual gross national product (GNP) growth rate had been 2–3 percent, which looks satisfactory, especially taking into account the overall production slump experienced by all of the republics after 1991.

Variations in the formulation of the past as an official political enterprise give significant clues to the genres of nationalism. The “state past” reveals preferences for different historical periods and different subdisciplines of history, as well as for alternative regional and international alliances.

The first written information about the Kyrgyz is found in ancient Chinese chronicles. However, no Kyrgyz historian who wrote a history of the nation can be identified before the end of the 19th century. Of course, there were many relaters of genealogical legends and stories based mainly on folk heritage. This paucity of indigenous historiography is the reason that Kyrgyz history has been written mainly from external sources in various languages, including Chinese, Arabic, Iranian, Greek, Turkic, Mongolian, and Russian. Kyrgyz historians made their first attempts at publishing histories at the beginning of the 20th century under the influence of the reformist movement known as Jadidism. Some Kyrgyz intellectuals brought out works in Kazan, Ufa, and Orenburg. For example, books by Osmonaaly Sydyk uulu were published in Ufa in 1913 and 1915.

Not much has hitherto been written about עAyn al-Quzat al-Hamadani (1098–1131)—about his life, writings, social and political environment, incarceration in Baghdad, and tragic execution. Hamid Dabashi's book is, therefore, at first sight a desired contribution in the field of medieval studies. The author presents a portrait of עAyn al-Quzat as a “Persian individual” who belongs neither specifically to Sufi tradition nor to any other categorical appellations; rather, he is a free thinker who challenges Islamic sacred tenets about prophethood, sainthood, the nature of God, and so on. This gives a new picture of עAyn al-Quzat. The book is divided into eleven chapters, excluding the Introduction and Conclusion. Chapters 1–4 describe עAyn al-Quzat's life (his social, political, literary, and educational background); in Chapters 5–9, Dabashi gives a close reading of עAyn al-Quzat's oeuvre; and Chapters 10–11 are devoted to עAyn al-Quzat's death and his portrayal in hagiographies. Although Dabashi's approach is interesting, I have mixed feelings about the book, which I shall address shortly.

Gerald T. Elmore's Islamic Sainthood in the Fullness of Time: Ibn al-עArabi's Book of the Fabulous Gryphon marks another significant milestone in the ever-expanding realm of Sufi studies focused on the Andalusian master. Aside from the previous works of William Chittick, Michel Chodkiewicz, Claude Addas, Henry Corbin, James W. Morris, and so on, the past few years have seen the publication of some important translations of primary materials from Ibn al-עArabi. The most successful example of this, perhaps, is The Meccan Illuminations, a partial thematic translation of the Futuhat al-Makkiya. Elmore's task is significant because it represents the translation of a single text, the Kitab עAnqaء Mughrib. While obviously not on the same level of significance as either the Futuhat or the Fusus al-hikam, the current text is a minor classic of Ibn al-עArabi's that does shed some additional light on the great Sufi master's views on the nature of sainthood, particularly as articulated through the concepts of the seal of saints (also called the Mahdi in this text). Other sections of the book deal with the emergence of the world from the macrocosmic haqiqa al-muhammadiya (The Muhammadan Reality). A subsequent section deals with ten microcosmic “jewels” or pearls.

The book under review is a monograph on one of the most outstanding figures in the tradition of Islamic mysticism. Ruzbihan Baqli (1128–1209) is celebrated for numerous works he wrote in both Persian and Arabic, treating a range of subjects, from Qurءanic exegesis to prophetic traditions, Islamic law, theology, jurisprudence, language and grammar, Sufism, and biography. Ruzbihan is most renowned, however, for his extensive mystical writings, especially his עAbhar al-עashiqin (The Jasmine of Lovers), in which he meticulously outlines theories of mystical love, and his Sharh-i Shathiyyat, (Commentary on Ecstatic Saying), in which he offers a commentary on the ecstatic locutions of mystics, particularly Husayn Mansur Hallaj (executed 922). Ruzbihan belongs to the group of malāmatī (self-blame) mystics who, as described in this book, maintained “perfect obedience to the law in private and outrageous behavior designed to incur censure in public” (p. 10).

Since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the colonization of most of the Arab world by Western powers during the first part of the 20th century, Arab intellectuals have been searching for answers to the many political and social questions—indeed, dilemmas—the Arab world has been facing. The appearance of communism at the beginning of the last century, embodying both an agenda for social justice and a Marxist methodology for historical analysis, appealed to many of them as a possible answer to these questions. Since then, many attempts have been made to show that there is compatibility between Islam and Marxist socialism—or, at least, that there is no incompatibility. The book under consideration, Min tarikh al-harakat al-fikriyyah fi-l-islam (The History of Intellectual Movements in Islam), is one of these attempts. Its author is considered by Professor Tamara Sonn, the translator of this book from the original Arabic, to be the first Arab to adopt the Marxist methodology in analyzing Islamic history. “Bandali Jawzi's work is . . . historically significant as the first full-scale Marxist analysis of the nature and development of Islamic though” (p. 16).

Aziz Abbassi has rendered a useful service to scholars of contemporary Arab thought in providing the first English translation of the Moroccan philosopher Mohammed עAbed al-Jabri's writings. Al-Jabri is one of the leading voices in the discourse of cultural authenticity in the Arab world. Among his best-known works are Nahnu waءl-Turath (We and Our Heritage, 1980), al-Khitab al-עArabi al-Muءasir: Dirasah Tahliliyyah Naqdiyyah (Contemporary Arab Discourse: A Critical and Analytical Study, 1982), and Naqd al-עAql al-עArabi (Critique of Arab Reason, 1984–90). The present collection, translated from a French translation (from the original Arabic) published in 1994, includes selections from Nahnu waءl-Turath, as well as al-Jabri's reflections on patterns of reasoning in Arab philosophy. The choice of texts was made with the advice of al-Jabri.

This detailed and clearly written book is an invaluable window onto a period of Jewish history that has remained largely unknown to all but a handful of specialists. For more than six centuries two important institutions of Jewish learning and leadership dominated Babylonia, a loose geographic term used by Jews to refer to an area roughly corresponding to modern-day Iraq. From the middle of the 6th to the middle of the 11th century, the heads of these yeshivot (s. yeshivah), known as geonim (s. gaon), exercised a combination of spiritual and political authority over Jewish communities throughout the Near East, North Africa, and Europe. Their most enduring impact on Jewish civilization, however, was the canonization of the Babylonian Talmud, which, as a result of their efforts, became the cornerstone of all forms of medieval rabbinic Judaism. Brody's book, based on a mastery of the primary sources as well as recent work in the field, provides the first comprehensive summary of the achievements of the geonim in almost fifty years, a task made both challenging and imperative by the progress of research on materials from the Cairo Genizah since the publication of S. Assaf's Tequfat ha-geءonim ve-sifrutah in 1955.

This book is not about Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. It is about Islam in relation to Christianity and Judaism. And despite its subtitle, it is not an explication of theological and historical affiliations. In fact, because the author never establishes his intent, methodologies, or conceptual approaches in writing this book, it is rather difficult to understand exactly what its purpose is.

This volume, which succeeds in being both brilliant and riddled with weaknesses, appears at a time when the lines between proper academic study of the Bahai movement on the one hand and faith-based scholarship on the other are being blurred and even derided. To make my own position clear, I am deeply committed to a strictly academic approach to the study of religion and thus find myself alienated by apologetics dressed up as academic studies. I am in particular profoundly worried by increasing attempts by orthodox Bahais to seize the academic high ground through organizations such as the Association of Bahai Studies, the Bahai Chair at the University of Maryland, Landegg International University, and, most recently, the Bahai-funded Chair at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, while resorting to the use of excommunication against Bahai scholars who take unorthodox positions. The Bahais, like the Unification Church in the 1980s, are using their financial muscle to set the academic agenda relating to their faith.

The origins and early development of Islam as determined from its most important and foundational texts is the project this book undertakes. As such, it stands in a tradition of Orientalist scholarship on early Muslim historiography that reaches back to the 19th century and that continues to generate debates among historians. Narratives of Islamic Origins is important for many reasons, not least because it clarifies the history of the issues that have divided historians, offering pointed critiques of major, particularly recent, works in the debate, while at the same time marking out a position that the author consistently defends in the Introduction and twelve chapters and appendixes. The use of the term “Orientalist” here is not meant to evoke, but rather to recognize—as Donner states at the outset—that European scholars of the 19th and early 20th centuries took Arabic sources seriously and made them available to succeeding generations. Donner's purpose is not to question their motives for doing this; rather, it is to analyze the textual evidence, arguments, and conclusions they adduced. The author has also written numerous articles and chapters on early Islamic history as well as the acclaimed and not uncontroversial book The Early Muslim Conquests (1981).